ABSTRACT
Modern nervousness is the cry of the system struggling with its environment. Modern bodies condensed charges from global circuits; nearby non-modern bodies were left vulnerable and confused, tied to obsolete localities and materialities. Rapid railway travel, abruptly shifting people between localities and exposing them to rushed, flickering views, also figured as a strain on modern nerves. Sociologist George Simmel depicted neurasthenia as the "blasé condition", an altered consciousness characteristic of capitalist modernity. Werner Sombart's 1911The Jews and Modern Capitalism shifted the encounter between tradition and capitalism back to early modern Europe. Sombart claimed that rooted-in-the-land Northern Europeans were incapable of conceiving of capitalism, and in particular finance, because those things were alien to their cultures and minds. Sombart stressed rationality and abstract thought, interpreted in Herderian fashion as integral to one culture and alien to another.
